and sleeps, putting his feet up in a booth;
another folds paper tablecloths. Why
have I stopped to eat alone on this rainy
day? Why savor the wet meat of the
steamed dumpling? As I pick it up,
the waiter appraises me. Am I
one of those women who must stop
for treats along the way—am I that starved?
The white dough burns—much too hot—yet,
I stick it in my mouth, quickly,
as if to destroy the evidence.
The waiter still watches. Suddenly
I am sorry to be here, sad,
my little pleasure stolen.
Stuck
The traffic backs up.
We’re not moving.
The CB says it’s construction
on the bridge. “I should be driving,” I say.
“I’m afraid to be stuck on a bridge.”
“It’s only a short one,” you say,
“just over the Connecticut River.”
I sit back on my backbone.
“Shouldn’t you be in that lane? It
seems to be moving faster.” “Yeah,
but the CB says the left lane
is open on the bridge.”
We sit. The truckers are angry—
“Another four-wheeler messin’ things up.”
The four-wheelers are angry—
“Goddamn eighteen-wheelers fuckin’ up the bridge.”
The right lane moves ahead.
My heart pounds;
my palms glaze with sweat.
If I were driving, I say to myself, I’d
move into that fast lane, then
cut back in front of the others. You are
calm, humming, tapping the steering
wheel with your fingers—though the car
in front of us is letting drivers
cut back in.
“No cuts,” I want to scream.
But I keep silent, count
my breaths to thirteen
and start again.
Squeaky Bed
At your mother’s house we lie
stiff in our bed as paper dolls.
Soon you snore and the crickets burst
through the window with squeaky horns.
She is old and toothless,
when we make love we
rock in the arms of a
new mother, she will not hear.
The crickets never sleep. All night
they want it.
Love is more real
than fear. Soon we will
give ourselves over to the noise.
The Good Old Dog
I will lay down my silk robe
beside me near the old bed,
for the good old dog;
she loves the feel
of it under her, and she will
push it and pull it, knead
and scrape until she has it right;
then she’ll drop down,
heavy, silver and black in the moonlight,
on it and a couple of pillows (not
bothering the cat who has taken over
her real bed)
and breathe out deeply.
Gorgeously fat,
her face
like the face of a seal.
The Promise
I will never again
expect too much of you. I have
found out the secret of marriage:
I must keep seeing your beauty
like a stranger’s, like the face
of a young girl passing on a train
whose moment of knowing illumines
it—a golden letter in a book.
I will look at you in such
exaggerated moments, lengthening
one second and shrinking eternity
until they fit together like man and wife.
My pain is expectation:
I watch you for hours sleeping, expecting
you to roll over like a dead man,
and look me in the eye;
my days are seconds of waiting
like the seconds between the makings
of boiling earth and sweating rivers.
What am I waiting for if not
your face—like a fish floating
up to the surface, a known
but forgotten expression that
suddenly appears—or like myself,
in a strip of mirror, when, having
passed, I come back to that image
hoping to find the woman
missing. Why do you think I sleep
in the other room, planets away,
in a darkness where I could die solitary,
an old nun wrapped in clean white sheets?
Because of lies I sucked
in my mother’s milk, because
of pictures in my first grade reader—
families in solid towns as if
the world were rooted and grew down
holding to the rocks, eternally;
because of rings in jewelers’ windows
engraved with sentiments—I love you
forever—as if we could survive
any beauty for longer than just after . . .
So I hobble down a hall
of disappointments past where
your darkness and my darkness have
had intercourse with each other.
Why have I wasted my life
in anger, thinking I could have more
than what is glimpsed in recognitions?
I will let go, as we must
let go of an angel called
back to heaven; I will not hold
her glittering robe, but let it
drift above me until I see
the last shred of evidence.
For a Man Who Speaks with Birds
Always, around the others
you wear your body
as if you put on the old
football pads of boyhood;
they are still much too large for you,
you turn and twist in them
like a man in the sheets of a nightmare.
Businessmen choose you to lead them,
you step forward
built for defenses—barreled ribs
around the heart of one
who wants to speak to the redbirds.
Are you trying to find a way out,
like a woman stuck between floors
pushing all the dead buttons?
Your mouth has spoken
the whistles of redbirds,
but your eyes know how to look
from a great height,
as a king must have watched
a slave from a window.
I pity you going from town to town
with your satchel of orders
from devil to devil;
your bones must hold up such metal
while your heart wants to speak
in the tongues of red angels.
Touching/Not Touching: My Mother
i.
That first night in the hotel bedroom,
when the lights go out,
she is already sleeping (that woman who has always
claimed sleeplessness), inside her quiet breathing
like a long red gown. How can she
sleep? My heart beats as if I am alone,
for the first time, with a lover or a beast.
Will I hate her drooping mouth,
her old woman rattle? Once I nearly
suffocated on her breast. Now I can almost
touch the other side of my life.
ii.
Undressing
in the dark,
looking,
not looking,
we parade before each other,
old proud peacocks, in our stretch marks
with hanging butts. We are equals. No
more do I need to wear her high heels to step
inside the body of a woman.
Her beauty and strangeness no longer seduce
me out of myself. I show my good side, my
long back, strong mean legs, my thinness that
came from learning to hold back
from taking what’s not mine. No more
a thief for love. She takes off her
bra, facing me, and I see those gorgeous
globes, soft, creamy,
high; my mouth waters.
how will I resist
crawling in beside her, putting
my hand for warmth under
her thin night dress?
My Father Still Sleeping after Surgery
In spite of himself,
my father loved me. In spite
of the hands that beat me, in spite
of the mouth that kept silent, in spite
of the face that turned cruel
as a gold Chinese king,
he could not control the love
that came out of him.
The body is monumental, a colossus
through which he breathes.
His hands crawl over his stomach
jerkily as sand crabs on five legs;
he makes a fist
like the fist of a newborn.
Boy at the Paterson Falls
I am thinking of that boy who bragged about the day he threw
a dog over and watched it struggle to stay upright all
the way down.
I am thinking of that rotting carcass on the rocks,
and the child with such power he could call to a helpless
thing as if he were its friend, capture it, and think of
the cruelest punishment.
It must have answered some need, some silent screaming in a
closet, a motherless call when night came crashing;
it must have satisfied, for he seemed joyful, proud, as if he
had once made a great creation out of murder.
That body on the rocks, its sharp angles, slowly took the shape of
what was underneath, bones pounded, until it lay on the bottom
like a scraggly rug.
Nothing remains but memory—and the suffering of those who
would walk into the soft hands of a killer for a crumb of bread.
Fears of the Eighth Grade
When I ask what things they fear,
their arms raise like soldiers volunteering for battle:
Fear of going into a dark room, my murderer is waiting.
Fear of taking a shower, someone will stab me.
Fear of being kidnapped, raped.
Fear of dying in war.
When I ask how many fear this,
all the children raise their hands.
I think of this little box of consecrated land,
the bombs somewhere else,
the dead children in their mothers’ arms,
women crying at the gates of the bamboo palace.
How thin the veneer!
The paper towels, napkins, toilet paper—everything
burned up in a day.
These children see the city after Armageddon.
The demons stand visible in the air
between their friends talking.
They see fire in a spring day
the instant before conflagration.
They feel blood through closed faucets,
the dead rising from the boiling seas.
The Furious Boy
In the classroom, the furious boy—a heavy star.
The unhappiness in the room finds his heart,
enters it;
The sheet of paper flapping in his face.
Who takes something takes it from him.
The rejections look for him.
The inflicted pain finds him.
He cannot say no. The hole in his heart deepens,
pain has no way out. A light too heavy
to escape, a presence more concentrated,
warmth is everywhere except where he sits at the center
holding the world in place.
The children touch him gently; the teacher lets him be.
Such a weight!
One black child in a perfect town;
there is no reason for sadness.
In an Urban School
The guard picks dead leaves from plants.
The sign over the table reads:
Do not take or touch anything on this table!
In the lunchroom the cook picks up in her dishcloth
what she refers to as “a little friend,”
shakes it out,
and puts the dishcloth back on the drain.
The teacher says she needs stronger tranquilizers.
Sweat rises on the bone of her nose,
on the plates of her skull under unpressed hair.
“First graders, put your heads down. I’m taking names
so I can tell your parents
which children do not obey their teacher.”
Raheim’s father was stabbed last week.
Germaine’s mother, a junkie,
was found dead in an empty lot.
The Polishers of Brass
I am thinking of the men who polish brass in Georgetown;
bent over, their hands push back and forth with enormous
force on each square inch.
So many doors, knobs, rails!
Men in their twenties, men in their sixties;
when they have gone all around and arrive at the place
where they started, it has already tarnished, and they must
begin again.
For the Dishwasher at Boothman’s
I sit in front of him
and look him in the eye.
Pastrami on rye.
So accustomed to being invisible,
he startles, as if a door
opened and revealed his face.
His smile says, you should know better,
and he nods his head to the right
like a low angel would nod toward God.
His face is warped
around a center crack, as if
two pains were seamed
together at his birth.
His face would break
his mother’s heart.
I read down the left side.
I read down the right.
Plaid Pants
At the bus terminal she says:
“Don’t sit next to him,”
and she puts her finger next to her nose
to signal that
one dressed in that garment stinks.
He wears a long white robe,
like a priest with special orders—
the underwear of the Mass—
and a fur cap to cover
his wisdom, so it will stay hot
in this cold climate.
From the soiled seats heading toward Newark,
he stands up. Turning,
I see his face.
I smell nothing, but his face
has its own dark light
inside of the dark
of the cabin, like a moon,
or a candle under smoky glass.
He goes to the bathroom
and comes out a new man—
in plaid polyester pants!
Books
Today Lorca and Pound
fell off my shelf.
They lay there on the floor
like a couple of drunks.
How humble are the lives
of books!
How small their expectations!
They wait quietly,
pressed together,
to be called into
the light. When you open them,
they tell you everything
they know. They
exhaust you with
secrets, like
convicts and madmen
too eager to speak.
Allen Ginsberg
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Once Allen Ginsberg stopped to pee at a bookstore
in New Jersey,
but he looked like a bum—
not like the miracle-laden Christ with electric atom juice,
not like the one whose brain is a river in which was plunked
the stone of the world (the one bathing fluid to wash away
25,000 year half-lives), he was dressed as a bum.
He had wobbled on a pee-heavy bladder
in search of a gas station,
a dime store with a quarter booth,
a Chinese restaurant,
when he came to that grocery store of dreams:
Chunks of Baudelaire’s skin
glittered in plastic;
his eyes in sets, innocent
as the unhoused eyes of a butchered cow.
In a dark corner, Rimbaud’s
genitals hung like jerky,
and the milk of Whitman’s breasts
drifted in a carton, dry as talcum.
He wanted to pee and lay his head
on the cool stacks;
but the clerk took one look
and thought of the buttocks of clean businessmen squatting
during lunch hour,
the thin flanks of pretty girls buying poetry for school.
Behind her, faintly,
the deodorized bathroom.
She was the one at the gate
protecting civilization.
He turned, walked to the gutter,
unzipped his pants, and peed.
Do you know who that was?
A man in the back came forth.
Soon she was known as
the woman in the store on Main
who said no to Allen Ginsberg;
and she is proud—
so proud she told this story
pointing to the spot outside, as if
still flowed that holy stream.
On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses
Mowing his three acres with a tractor,
a man notices something ahead—a mannequin—
he thinks someone threw it from a car. Closer
he sees it is the body of a black woman.
Medics come and turn her with pitchforks.
Her gaze shoots past him to nothing. Nothing
is explained. How many black women
have been turned up to stare at us blankly,
in weedy fields, off highways,
pushed out in plastic bags,
shot, knifed, unclothed partially, raped,
their wounds sealed with a powdery crust.
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